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5 Ways to Rethink Your Recruiting Strategy

Over my three-decade career, I have had the opportunity to work with many HR teams. Overall, if I had to grade HR’s effectiveness in bringing in the talent necessary for long term success, I’d give them a mixed review. Even though many HR pros would argue that one of their key roles is recruitment, my observation is that HR teams tend to focus more on the administrative aspects of the role — managing payroll and benefits, coordinating training and development plans, ensuring compliance, and administering reward programs. I was always concerned that HR leadership didn’t give a high enough priority to

5 Proven Ways to Make Employees Never Want to Leave

Recruiting the right employees is a time-consuming and important process. Hiring the right people is critical to the organization achieving its goals. But what happens when a new hire shows up for work? How can you make sure your star candidate becomes a happy, dedicated employee who never wants to leave? I’ve learned five keys to meeting new employees’ expectations and keeping them engaged on the job. “How Can I Help” Leadership Command and control is old-school; servant leadership is the new school of management. To improve retention, throw out old dictatorial practices and focus on how leaders help employees achieve

3 Proven Ways Successful Leaders Handle the Unexpected

To survive and thrive in today’s unpredictable markets, successful leaders must treat contingency planning as a priority.

This is What Happens When You Pay For It

The challenge for leadership is to make strategic objectives meaningful at the individual employee level and if employees aren’t paid to further the strategic goals of the organization, they won’t be achieved.

Five Sure-Fire Ways to Get a Strategic Disadvantage

Every organization seeks to gain a strategic advantage over their competitors but many of the more common practices employed have the opposite effect.

Seven Terrific Ways a Leader Can Make the Right Choice

Great leaders see the differences in people; they don’t accept that any two people are “equally qualified”.

You don’t Have to be Charismatic to be a Remarkable Leader

Most people think of leaders as being charismatic. These are individuals who are constantly in front of the troops. Shouting encouragement and cheering them on. The “out front” leader plays an important role in an organization, but there is another type of leader who lurks behind the scenes that deserves special mention because they are actually more effective than the “testosterone leader.” This is the behind-the-scenes leader who sees their raison d’être to create an environment for people to achieve remarkable things and to personally flourish. They place the priority on determining what people need to do their jobs and responding accordingly. Seven

One Simple Thing Every Successful Leader Has

I have never espoused that there is a silver bullet for leadership; that there is one single trait or attribute that distinguishes a remarkable leader from others. Rather I have ascribed standout leadership to many little things that are practiced with relentless passion and consistency. That said, I do believe that to be a member of the leader herd, and qualify to be considered a standout leader, you must posses a particular trait. You must make the move from “it” to “them” – from thinking about the job simply as one of creating vision and values to realizing that the job

Motivate Your Team to Deliver Excellent Customer Service

It’s one thing to declare that providing top notch service is your strategy to outdo the competition, but it’s quite another to actually do it and do it consistently. These 5 steps will help achieve your goal. Create your service strategy. Effective and remarkable service delivery requires a strategic context that everyone understands at an intimate level. The service strategy defines how people and systems will “behave” in front of the customer. Without a strategy, inconsistency occurs as employees define “excellent service” their own way. In addition, your service strategy must differentiate your organization from your competitors in some way; a

The One Trait I Have Seen Derail Leaders’ Careers

What makes one leader successful while another “crashes and burns”? If there is a tipping point in a leader’s career, what would it be? In my business life, I have seen individuals develop into remarkable leaders and I have seen their colleagues gradually disappear into mediocrity. The remarkable ones “see” themselves differently. They don’t see themselves as an expression of leadership pedagogy. Derailed leaders find themselves consumed by the “Leadership 101 Rulebook”, relying on theoretical concepts of leadership developed by the consulting and academic community. They are derailed by applying what OTHERS believe leadership to be and not “making a good choice”

How Memorable Leaders Create Their Legacy

I see most leaders at the finishing line of their career or tenure looking back over their journey to think about what they accomplished; what they will be remembered for. Politicians are famous for this. They reflect on the programs, policies and legislation their administration introduced and hope something will resonate with historians and be remembered by their constituents. CEO’s like to think about the strategic move they made that created an order of magnitude increase in shareholder value or that significantly changed the competitive landscape for their organization. This is a traditional view of determining a leader’s legacy; it assesses

Does Vision Make a Great Leader?

Many describe a great leader as one who has vision. A leader who is able effortlessly to conceptualize what strategy and direction is required to meet the competitive and economic challenges of the day. A leader who can integrate the various pieces of a complicated business puzzle in their mind and create a strategy of what has to be done to achieve success. There is no question that visioning is an important ingredient of leadership, but it isn’t the characteristic that distinguishes the good leader from the bloody brilliant one. It’s not what the leader THINKS that guides the organization through

Successful Leaders Go “Bump In The Night”

I am amused when all I hear leaders talk about is their successes. The triumphs they achieved paint a blueprint of what it takes to achieve greatness. The algorithm for leadership success is almost exclusively based on what worked for them. True, events that went the right way for someone should be dissected and analyzed. It is important to understand the specific actions taken and behaviors exhibited that yielded a productive outcome. But the reality is that very few stand-out leaders waltz through their career to command a winner’s platform. Successful leaders suffer personal setbacks. My career produced disappointments that foreshadowed future successes.

How To Lead Change By Looking At The Past

There is certainly no shortage of advice on what actions leaders should take to successfully implement change. However, despite the plethora of guidance available, organizations generally have difficulty executing their “brave idea”. The desired change doesn’t see the light of day; the intended benefits aren’t realized; dysfunction and discontent are often left as the aftermath. Traditional change management methodology has two fundamental flaws. First, the premise of change management is based on the future. It focuses on what needs to be done differently in order to meet expected new environmental and competitive shifts. The risk here is the implicit internal message

Grandma’s Christmas Gift to Leaders

As we all know, Christmas is a hectic time of year. The calendar is jammed with work and social events, the pocketbook is stretched and the need to fulfill family dreams is overwhelming. It is a time of year when stress levels reach a tipping point for many. And yet Grandma always pulls it off. She gets it done with flawless precision year after year. It’s not by serendipity that she delivers the “Christmas product” so magnificently, offering joy to those around her, and strengthening the family bond. Grandma’s consistency is borne from the innate skills she possesses to produce a

5 Steps To Take Employee Engagement To Another Level

Why is employee engagement critical to an organization? Many think “getting more employees involved” is the end game. That’s true, but for what purpose? To make every person feel like they are making a contribution? To make them happier? To make them more supportive of leadership? If the purpose of employee engagement isn’t clearly defined, and a disciplined process to achieve that purpose isn’t established, the best that can happen is busyness and dysfunction. Employees are busy as hell but they are not acting in unison towards a shared outcome. Employee engagement must be strategically driven. It must be THE vehicle

6 Ways Leaders Can Excel at Engaging Employees

Much has been written on how organizations can engage their employees more successfully and create a competitive advantage. The advice offered tends to be of a program nature: company-wide initiatives promulgated from above that all functions “down below” are expected to participate in. My thirty-three plus years of leadership experience suggests a different way of looking at how to “hook” every employee in the goals and strategy of the organization. People relate more to other people, not “corporate programs” offered by human resources or business planning. This requires that every team leader take personal responsibility to see that the employees who

10 Acts of Humanity Standout Leaders Perform Daily

Standout leadership doesn’t have to be complicated; it doesn’t have to conform to doctrine advocated by leadership gurus and HR pundits who advocate a more theoretical model. In my experience, leadership that sets you apart from the crowd boils down to how well you practice a few basic human acts, not on how well you comply with text book principles. Help others. It’s a basic human instinct to come to the aid of someone in need. When refugees from another country needs help, many in the world respond in a caring way. In an organization, it doesn’t happen as much. When

How Leaders Get Everyone Marching in the Same Direction

One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of congruency between what the strategy says and what people do on a day-to-day basis. The strategy says one thing and not only do people do another, they do different things out of sync with the strategy. Massive inconsistency and dysfunction results. This is a failure of leadership. Leadership tends to place more focus on direction-setting rather than on determining how the strategy will be executed. Precision is applied to “getting the strategy right” and not how it will be implemented in the trenches where the real work gets done.

Successful Leadership Doesn’t Depend on Schooling

Standout leadership is not discovered in any textbook. It is born in the trenches where results are achieved, conflict occurs, people engage and pain is experienced. Every day is different. Each day teaches you something new. My schooling as a leader covered more than 12,000 days. They taught me these five key lessons. 1. Imperfection explains most success. Unfortunately, school teaches us that problems have “right” answers. This belief is a non-starter in business, where workable and remarkable solutions are often inelegant and messy. But they are effective because they capture the hearts of the people implementing them. Business is fluid.

Standout Leaders Covet These 12 Competencies in People

Leaders don’t hire. Yes, you hire to fill a job but you recruit to bring in the right “human essence” to your organization to ensure its long-term success. Discover these competencies in people and gather them around you: Lifelong learner: If you’re not learning, you bring little future value to an organization. Look for evidence that prospects are active learners. What areas are they interested in? Who have they learned from? What have they done to apply what they’ve learned and how can they be put to use in your organization? Infection agent: The ability to infect others with the interest

Do You Flit or Do You Lead?

Many leaders don’t lead at all, they flit from this to that, from one crisis to another, from one priority to another. They don’t land on anything. They don’t spend too long on any one issue because they want to avoid being pinned down for an opinion or having to make a decision. As long as they are on the move, they can “be forgiven” for not clearly understanding an issue enough to have an informed view on it. They are thinkers who are more comfortable with the rarefied air up high than the details where the devil lives. They tend

10 Ways To Be A Stand-Out Leader

It’s not good enough these days to be a great leader, you have to be a stand-out leader. The challenges facing organizations these days are horrendous. Uncertainty, unpredictability, and randomness all underscore the storm forces that threaten to destroy them. To thrive and survive the maelstrom requires more than greatness from the individuals entrusted to lead in this type of world. “Great” doesn’t cut it. We need leaders that are stand-outs; people who cannot be compared to others because their distinctiveness defies any standard. Here are 10 practical and proven attributes of the stand-out leader that I have discovered: The stand-out

16 Secrets of Mind-Blowing Leaders

We are besieged with mountains of advice on how to be a “good” leader who practices the craft according to principles espoused by the crowd of academics, consultants and other self proclaimed experts. Whereas guidance from the pundits can be useful it stops short of enabling someone to separate themselves from the herd and become a memorable leader who is truly different. Contemporary leadership dogma does nothing more than define the entry criteria for being in the leader game; the foundation for good leadership. Without this foundation you are unlikely to achieve and hold a leadership position; with it you are

5 Most Important Decisions a Leader Can Make

As a leader, you do have a choice as to how you spend your decision-making time; there are numerous possibilities when it comes to which decisions to make yourself and those that you leave for others. How do you determine the “my decision” areas? The criteria I used was payback. Where could I add the greatest value to the organization? It’s not about what you enjoy doing or where your strengths are; it’s about where OTHERS will realize the maximum benefit if you focus your decision-making time there. You may be amazing at financial analysis and enjoy dabbling in numbers, but

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Roy Osing

Roy Osing

5 Ways to Rethink Your Recruiting Strategy

5 Proven Ways to Make Employees Never Want to Leave

3 Proven Ways Successful Leaders Handle the Unexpected

This is What Happens When You Pay For It

Five Sure-Fire Ways to Get a Strategic Disadvantage

Seven Terrific Ways a Leader Can Make the Right Choice

You don’t Have to be Charismatic to be a Remarkable Leader

One Simple Thing Every Successful Leader Has

Motivate Your Team to Deliver Excellent Customer Service

The One Trait I Have Seen Derail Leaders’ Careers

How Memorable Leaders Create Their Legacy

Does Vision Make a Great Leader?

Successful Leaders Go “Bump In The Night”

How To Lead Change By Looking At The Past

Grandma’s Christmas Gift to Leaders

5 Steps To Take Employee Engagement To Another Level

6 Ways Leaders Can Excel at Engaging Employees

10 Acts of Humanity Standout Leaders Perform Daily

How Leaders Get Everyone Marching in the Same Direction

Successful Leadership Doesn’t Depend on Schooling

Standout Leaders Covet These 12 Competencies in People

Do You Flit or Do You Lead?

10 Ways To Be A Stand-Out Leader

16 Secrets of Mind-Blowing Leaders

5 Most Important Decisions a Leader Can Make

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Roy Osing

Roy Osing

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